Bikewagon is a thriving business that offers discount bike parks, bikes, and cycling gear to bicycle enthusiasts across the country. And while their instore business boomed, their online ecommerce site was stunted by out of date code and several fundamental misconfigurations. Eager to improve their site’s functionality, speed, and scalability, they contact the QXD software development team for help.

The Challenge

When it became clear that their site was in need of a boost, Bikewagon approached the QXD team for help with the software development. The initiative would improve their e-commerce site’s overall performance by tackling issues of reliability and optimizing the code base already in play.

During the first meeting between QXD developers and the Bikewagon team, a few key performance indicators were identified and would later serve to determine our success. Their requirements included:

1. Improve overall site functionality
2. Improve site load time and speed
3. Ensure the site is responsive and mobile-friendly
4. Improve security standards
5. Ensure scalability in times of heavy traffic

The Results

In the case of Bikewagon, optimizing functionality and ensuring their site could serve mobile clients and eager shoppers involved a front-to-back renovation: everything from website hosting to mobile-friendly design. But the results of their software overhaul are anything but superficial, and the results were almost instantaneous.

Today the site is fully responsive and able to load code, copy, and multimedia content lightyears faster than its predecessor. Improvements to the site’s infrastructure offer secure shopping transactions and enjoyable customer experience, complete with improved catalog searches and load times. As a result of these modifications, Bikewagon has steadily expanded its clientele and increased its sales during every subsequent business quarter.

The Solution

The QXD team began by tackling some of the site’s most glaring impediments and that meant immediately transferring Bikewagon away from its shared hosting package to a dedicated hosting server. Changing to dedicated server hosting affords Bikewagon a more reliable service and eliminated the risk of not having access to sufficient bandwidth or memory. It also provides greater security, more flexibility and control, as well as higher performance. Essentially, dedicated server hosting keeps things running quickly and efficiency, and in the world of software optimization it is considered low hanging fruit given the abundance of benefits provided by one simple change.

Once hosting was resolved, our attention changed to the configuration of the site’s Magento e-Commerce platform. In order to better handle large amounts of traffic and ensure that all site processes functioned properly, we separated the Magento admin from the front-end or client view.

In an effort to improve overall site speed and load time, our developers added cache and optimized certain required scripts, which acts to speeds up the website and helps save bandwidth by aggregating and minimizing JS, CSS and HTML.

Converting Bikewagon from a non-responsive site to a fully mobile-friendly website required building a front-end framework for faster and easier web development. While going mobile is important for almost every online business, it is particularly essential for ecommerce given that 57 percent of mobile users will abandon your website if it takes more than 3 seconds to load and 30 percent will abandon a purchase transaction if the shopping cart isn’t optimized for mobile devices.

The final piece of Bikewagon’s site optimizations involved scalability and ensuring the site could successfully handle significant fluctuations in traffic and accommodate spikes in site visits without compromising functionality and user experience. In order to achieve that, the QXD developers allocated additional server capability that the site has access to whenever required.